For the past 8 months, or so, I've been working on a project to create a Linux-compatible kernel in nothing but Rust and assembly. I finally feel as though I have enough written that I'd like to share it with the community!

I'm currently targeting the ARM64 arch, as that's what I know best. It runs on qemu as well as various dev boards that I've got lying around (pi4, jetson nano, AMD Kria, imx8, etc). It has enough implemented to run most BusyBox commands on the console.

Major things that are missing at the moment: decent FS driver (only fat32 RO at the moment), and no networking support.

More info is on the github readme.

https://github.com/hexagonal-sun/moss

Comments & contributions welcome!

We've seen this movie before with the BSDs. Hardware vendors love permissive licenses because they can fork, add their proprietary HAL/drivers, and ship a closed binary blob without ever upstreaming a single fix.

Linux won specifically because the GPL forced the "greedy" actors to collaborate. In the embedded space, an MIT kernel is just free R&D for a vendor who will lock the bootloader anyway.

Also, are there any opportunities to make this kernel significantly faster than Linux’s?

Could I swap Ubuntu's or Android's kernel with this, while keeping those OSes bootable?

What have you done?!